Zhou Liang

My internship

Liang spent 20 weeks at the UN Women’s office in Beijing. UN Women is the United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women. UN Women works for elimination of discrimination against women, empowerment of women, and equality between genders.

– The UN women’s team in Beijing consisted of only five employees, so as an intern, I got to do a variety of tasks. I quickly learned how to multitask.

Liang was engaged in several projects during her internship.One of the projects was called Engaging Young Men in Violence against Women and Girls through Social Media.– I streamed all the activities under this project in various university campuses. This included for example a moot court with a well-known domestic violence case in China, and a debate contest on the new judicial interpretations of the new marriage law in China. For these activities, I would take pictures of the activity, post updates on Weibo (Chinese Twitter), and interact with the followers.

– Another task was to find an advocate for UN Women in China. We wished to find a female Chinese celebrity as our spokesperson. I negotiated with the agents of these celebrities, which was fun, even though they could be a bit harsh. This was a lot more challenging than negotiating with for instance NGOs.

The purpose of finding a celebrity advocate for UN Women in China is to put gender issues on the agenda of common people, as well as for the Chinese government. One of the gender issues that already has the government’s attention is violence against women.

– Other gender issues face more obstacles to win the Chinese government's commitment and support, for instance women's political participation, gender and climate change and so on. Now, UN Women is starting to introduce more themes, like organizing workshops for government officials on other gender issues.

After graduating from the Master Programme in Development Studies Liang is going back to China. She’s open for different possibilities.– I really enjoyed working for UN Women and could imagine to keep working for them. Fieldwork would also be interesting to try!